They found, as they expected, that female authors were consistently underrepresented. Once the researchers identified the criteria they wanted to analyze, they used the OpenAlexdatabase, which aggregates information from many other databases of academic articles, to extract metadata on the authors of about 130,000 medical papers, from more than 7,500 journals, published between 2000 and August 2022. "What we wanted is to start a public dialogue on this topic, and we also want the community to contribute and recommend what the metrics should be," he says. However, because many of the papers analyzed in this study were not open-access, the researchers could not get this information for many of the papers and so did not include it in their final analysis.Ĭeli emphasizes that the metrics chosen for this study should be considered only a starting point for measuring impact on health outcomes in a more equitable way. The final metric that the researchers proposed is based on the diversity of traits of patients included in a given study, including sex, race-ethnicity, language, age, and geography. For example, a medical study that included doctors, nurses, and engineers would be rated more highly than one that included authors from just one of those fields. Under this metric, papers are given a higher score if they include authors from a wider range of disciplines. "What we need is cognitive diversity, which is predicated on lived experiences."Īnother factor that the researchers incorporated is the diversity of departmental affiliations of the authors of a study. They're all going to see the problem from the same angle," he says. "What happens when all of the authors involved in a project are alike is that they're going to have the same blind spots. This is important not only for promoting inclusion, but also because lack of diversity among authors of a medical study can result in failure to fully consider how a particular disease affects different groups of people, Celi says. The researchers also used an algorithm that categorized the authors as male or female. One factor is the diversity of the authors of a study, including whether the authors are located in a high-income country or a low- and middle-income country. To quantify the extent of this problem, the researchers created an index based on several factors. "How the medical knowledge system is designed has led to the fact that 80 percent of publications come from 20 percent of countries, and then the guidelines that are disseminated to treat diabetes, to treat hypertension, to treat cancer, are informed by trials and observational studies in those 20 percent of countries," he says. Most of these authors come from wealthy nations including the United States, and they are disproportionately white and male. The authors also include researchers from institutions around the world, including Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda, National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico, University of the Philippines at Manila, the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, Handong Global University in South Korea, and King Hussein Cancer Center in Jordan, and representing the fields of public health, pharmacy, medicine, computer science, engineering and the social sciences.Ĭeli and his colleagues began developing the new index in hopes of finding ways to document and combat the lack of diversity among authors of prominent medical publications. Jack Gallifant, a physician at Imperial College London NHS Trust, led the new study, which appears today in PLOS Global Public Health. The researchers hope that their new study will generate more discussion of how to evaluate medical papers and make sure they are contributing to positive health outcomes for diverse populations, not just the groups who have traditionally led and been the subjects of medical studies. "The medical knowledge system is controlled by a very noninclusive group of academics, and it's not diverse at all," says Leo Anthony Celi, a senior research scientist at MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, a physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School,and one of the authors of the paper. In a new study, the researchers evaluated more than 100,000 medical papers published in the last 20 years and found that most did not do well on this metric. The new metric incorporates several factors, including the diversity of the paper authors (in terms of gender and geographic location), diversity of the patients studied, and how interdisciplinary the research team is. To that end, they have developed a metric that they call the "diversity factor." To more fully capture a paper's impact on health, metrics should take into account the demographics of the researchers who performed the studies and the patients who participated in them, the research team says.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |